Complications arise when she falls into enemy hands, and she learns that appearances and emotions can be quite deceiving to all kinds of people. The youngest sibling is tasked with rescuing them in the most horrific way possible: she must weave six shirts from the fibers of a thorny plant, but she must not cry out in pain or ask for help or tell anyone her story - she is forbidden to speak at all. Her new stepmother, Lady Oonagh, quickly puts the entire household under a spell, ultimately turning Sorcha’s brothers into swans.
Her situation only gets worse when her brothers force her to abandon her charge and return home - their father is engaged to another woman and she is demanding that Sorcha meet her. She takes on the perilous task of healing one of her father’s captives, a wild young man named Simon who is beset by nightmares. The story centers around Sorcha, a young girl who lives in Sevenwaters with her six older brothers and her father. Like Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon or Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear, this is first-rate historical fantasy that can have the widest possible appeal, taking in also the readership of historical fiction writers like Mary Stewart ( The Crystal Cave), Mary Renault ( The Persian Boy) and Anya Seton ( Avalon).The first book of The Sevenwaters Trilogy by Juliet Marillier.Īn adaptation of the Grimms' fairy tale The Six Swans, set in 9th-century Ireland. In the process of her task (which binds her to muteness until it is accomplished), Sorcha will meet and fall in love with a Briton warlord (the enemy), and against all odds their love will triumph. This is an old Celtic legend in its own right: brilliantly evoked and brought to life, amid raids by both the Britons and the Vikings. When she catches the children plotting against her, she turns the brothers into swans, and Sorcha is set an impossible task in order to free them from her wicked spell.
Her six brothers, however (beautifully delineated characters, each of them), devote themselves to her and support her education in plant-lore, healing and natural magic.Īll is fine until the sensuous but evil Oonagh seduces their father, the warlord Colum, and sets about systematically breaking apart the family.
Sorcha is the seventh child of a seventh son: but as a daughter rather than the seventh son he desired, she is neglected, having also caused the death in childbirth of her beautiful mother Niamh.
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